MEMORIES OF PROFS °
And of the school. Please contribute. Amusing valued.
Dworkin Ronnie left YLS in the summer of 1969 to take up his position as the Oxford Professor of Jurisprudence that fall. His wife, Betsy, who grew up in
Manhattan, had gone to Brearley, an all-girls, private school on the Upper East Side. There she had become fast friends with
a daughter of the Schlumberger, oilfield-services fortune. This daughter's mother, Madame Anne Gruner Schlumberger, who lived half time in Greece and half in France, had created a
very large and magnificent estate, Les Treilles (now a foundation), in Provence, in the mountains above Nice. Since
Betsy and Ronnie were moving to England, why not come and spend the month of July at Les Treilles? We'll give you your own house to use. Ronnie was succeeding Herbert Hart at
Oxford and invited Herbert to join them for part of the time. I was studying with Herbert, and together we drove down from Dieppe to Les Treilles, where I managed to stay for several days
as well. There was plenty of room. Each member of the family had their own house, none of which could be seen from any other house. No other structure of any kind could be seen -- just
glorious mountains. Ronnie said that if he'd known how glorious this place was he, Betsy, and the children would have arrived at the stroke of 12 as midnight ushered in July 1. The children
received tennis lessons every day. Meals were prepared by a professional chef and served on an outdoor patio every day, usually fresh from one of the wood-burning grills. Madame
was supremely interested in the arts. The main building for artistic performances was surrounded by various modern sculptures, and the inside contained two things: sheep and a
harpsichord. Sheep? One of Madame's artist friends had created
life-size sheep
which could be arranged in various ways to make sofas you could recline on. The harpsichord
was so that Ralph Kirkpatrick, an American and the premier harpsichordist in the world (and who taught at Yale), would have
something to play on when he came to visit. ~More here. -- Hardy
* Ronnie's most famous book is Taking Rights Seriously; although published in
1977 it consists largely of essays he had worked on and some of which he had published while we were at YLS.
NOTE: Just discovered. From 2005 and from NYU, but just discovered. A lengthy article on Ronnie that amounts to a mini-biography, including not only
his wedding photo (and more), but an account of the course he co-taught one year with Bork -- hard to imagine that! (It did not go well). Click here.
Bishop Jon Hyman remembers Joe posing the question of whether Prince Charming's kiss constituted battery. He also remembers Pete Putzel's answer:
"They'll settle out of court!"
Joe used also to chuckle at the disproportion between cause and effect sometimes -- pointing out to us how vast the damage caused by a relatively
minor act of negligence could be -- failing to turn this knob, or dropping that there -- could end up blowing up the entire Port of New York!
Recently unearthed about Joe: "He played a central role in the Army-McCarthy hearings in the early 1950s when he was acting general counsel for the Department of the Army. In
this post he had to defend the Army against charges of communist infiltration leveled by the Wisconsin senator. During the course of the national controversy, McCarthy and his
associates publicly attacked Bishop for his refusal to turn over confidential loyalty-security information to the McCarthy Committee."
AP.
Lipson In the second semester of our first year of law school I took Leon Lipson’s international law class. The class was in one of those fairly large
YLS classrooms on the first floor. About two minutes into the class someone walked in late decked out in tennis shorts with a racquet in one hand and a couple of books and a can
of tennis balls in the other. The only vacant chair was way in the back. Having entered at the front of the room, the tennis jockey had to walk right past Lipson, who had stopped talking
in mid-sentence. It took the tennis jockey a good minute and a half to get to the vacant seat, put down his tennis gear, and sit down. The room remained deadly silent Lipson having stopped his
lecture in mid -sentence. After which Lipson broke silence by saying: “International law anyone?” and then completing his last lecture sentence exactly where he had stopped minutes
earlier. -- Mike Gross
I have a slightly different recollection of the Leon Lipson - tennis player episode. I remember the tennis player as being Joe Onek, and that Lipson’s dry remark was “Anyone for
a jolly volley?” Lipson always did the mid-syllable pause while any late arrival slunk to the seat (just as Calabresi always put out a tablet on his desk before class for anyone who
wasn’t prepared to answer questions to sign, “because I understand that happens to all of us, and I don’t want to embarrass you”; did anyone ever sign?)
-- Bill Iverson
Calabresi 113 Yale L.J. 6 2003-2004 contains a warm tribute by Guido to Gene Rostow, and it contains a story about Guido himself, told to Gene when he informed him of an offer he'd turned down
from Chicago and inquired about a full professorship at YLS. "I told Gene that my father, an associate professor of cardiology at the University of Milan, had every reason to expect to
be promoted to a full professorship at a very young age. His chief asked him to wait a year, since otherwise a more senior scholar would lose the chance, potentially forever. The chief told
my dad that he was in control of the national commission that would decide on chairs the next year and that my father would be a shoe-in then. Of course, my dad agreed. And so it would
have been, but for the fact that the next year the political situation deteriorated dramatically, and the Fascists were able to block my father's promotion. The result was that, when a few
years later we fled to America, my dad was in a much worse position in this new and not overly hospitable environment than he would have been had he come as a tenured professor. " Guido,
incidentally calls Rostow "probably the greatest Dean in the history of the Yale Law School." Article
here.
~A great deal more is on offer here .
J. Goldstein The essence of Max Gitter's tribute to Joe, available here, is
"He loved to teach, and it showed. And what he taught us in those seminar rooms was not so much the stated subjects of his seminars--criminal law, family law, psychoanalysis and the
law, and later constitutional law; rather he taught how to think about those subjects, about law, and about problems generally. And he also taught how to teach." But the tribute also has to
do with their Jewishness, and the humor there can be in this, including the following story which they both enjoyed: "It's the story about a successful businessman named Goldwater who
was trying to join an exclusive country club in Connecticut. But he was turned down. And he was crushed. So he went to see the head of the membership committee to find out why. And the
head of the committee said, 'Mr. Goldwasser, we don't admit your kind of people.' And Goldwater responded: 'Where did you get the idea that I'm 'one of those kind of people'? And,
what do you mean Goldwasser. My name is Goldwater. My name has always been Goldwater. My father's name was Goldwater. My grandfather's name was Goldwater. And my
great-grandfather -- Olev v'Shalom -- his name too was Goldwater.' "
Joe's Yale Bulletin obit is here,.
Black Harry Wellington's tribute to Charlie, available here, starts out with his
low opinion of Charlie's famous book, The People and the Court (1960). Wellington had clerked for Frankfurter and what Charlie said about Felix struck Harry as "wrong-headed."
But Harry's wife, Sheila, liked it and thought it important; Harry, however, was otherwise occupied (with labor law). The scales fell from Harry's eyes, however, when upon Charlie's retirement he took
up the book again. He was particularly struck by Charlie's justification of judicial review: "[T]he prime and most necessary function of the Court has been that of validation, not that of
invalidation . . . the Court,through its history, has acted as the legitimator of the government . . . [t]he power to validate is the power to invalidate. If the Court were deprived, by any means,
of its real and practical power to set bounds to governmental action, or even of public confidence that the Court itself regards this as its duty and will discharge it in a proper case, then
it must certainly cease to perform its central function of unlocking the energies of government by stamping governmental actions as legitimate." Harry now has a new philosophy, with Charlie:
"the legal realists-whatever else they accomplished-have taught all of us who do law in the United States that new law is produced in adjudication. Nor, as Charles tells us, was it ever
different; it was merely perceived differently." Bosh on the idea of judicial deference because Congress is electorally accountable and the Court is not. "Not only would such deference
destroy the affirmative, validating, legitimating work of judicial review . . . it would misunderstand the relative institutional competence of Court and Congress. For, as Charles sees it,
Congress can no more be a fair judge of prohibitions on its power . . . than a defendant can be a fair judge in his own case." In this NYT
obit, we find that Charlie owes it all to
Louis Armstrong and his trumpet.
Here's the professor's own account: 1931 and here's Savoy Blues.
McDougal Rostow identifies three McDougals in his retirement tribute, available here. 1) Senator: "a consummate Mississippi politician of the old school: worldly, perceptive, and persuasive -- principled, to be sure, but above all an artist in power . . . he knows about power, gathers it, cultivates it, and uses it . . . thrice Chairman of the Yale Law School's Faculty Committee on the selection of a dean." 2) The "kindest and most generous of friends and teachers. I have never witnessed a finer human relationship than that of McDougal's enlarged family: the web of interest, concern, and affection which links him to present and former students and colleagues all over the world." 3) "Scholar and theorist of law . . . fierce. An argument he regards as shallow or erroneous arouses his righteous wrath.The world of ideas is the passionate heart of his universe." This includes his partnership with Harold Lasswell, which plays an important role in the history of legal realism. The "McDougal-Lasswell approach . . . is completely free of the myopic concentration on what judges do . . . [and views] law as the product of a social process in which many institutions and groups, beyond the courts, must participate responsibly: legislatures and corporations, foreign offices and other agencies of national states, elites and nonelites, 'private' transnational bodies like churches and political parties, organs of the United Nations." "What McDougal and Lasswell have done, on a majestic scale, is to transform the sociological-functional jurisprudence of the Realist generation into a jurisprudence of values."
Pollak Please send in something about him. A link to his obit is
here. Included there is this: "Born on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, his father Walter Pollak was a lawyer who defended the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine African-American teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama in 1931.
Judge Pollak graduated from Harvard University in 1943 and then, after serving in the Army during World War II, graduated five years later from Yale Law School, where he was editor of the law review.
Judge Pollak immediately earned a clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge. It was there that he met who would become a lifelong friend in William T. Coleman Jr., a Germantown native who was clerking for Justice
Felix Frankfurter. Coleman went on become the first black partner at a major Philadelphia law firm and U.S. Secretary of Transportation under President Ford.
After completing his clerkship in 1951, Pollak joined the New York law firm Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison and eventually married founding partner Louis Weiss’ daughter, Katherine, in 1952.
In 1950, Pollak and Coleman were recruited by Thurgood Marshall to assist with the plaintiffs brief for Brown v. Board of Education, of which they were two of several co-authors. Over
the course of five years, the duo also worked on Bolling v. Sharpe (which argued against segregation of the Washington, D.C., schools) and Brown v. Board II. . . .
In 1955, he joined the faculty of the Yale Law School, where he remained until 1974 and served as dean from 1965 to 1970. Judge Pollak joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1974 and became dean the following year. He
left the school in 1978 when he was appointed by President Carter to the U.S. District Court."
Brown A Conversation with Ralph S. Brown can be found here. Much is of interest,
but one is particularly relevant in the Covid-19 era: "Then the minute I got back from the Navy (I was down at my family’s in the Eastern Shore of Maryland) I got pneumonia and was
really quite ill. I dare say I was saved because the sulfa drugs were then being made available and my next brother took a rather sadistic delight in sticking a needle in my rear several
times a day for about a week, filling me full of sulfa drugs"
Summers The NYT obit for Clyde barely mentions Yale, emphasizing instead his thirty years at Penn. But he had almost twenty years at YLS (1956-75), and it was while there that he drafted
what became his most famous accomplishment, the Landrum-Griffin Act, "often called the Bill of Rights for union
members," a law guaranteeing "freedom of speech for union members and periodic secret elections of union leaders." He was at YLS also during his 1966 involvement in seeking justice
after two dissenters in the painters union in the SF area were murdered. "After the 1969 murder of Joseph A. Yablonski, a rival of W. A. Boyle, the autocratic president of the United Mine
Workers, Mr. Summers led efforts to rewrite that union’s constitution to make it more democratic. Mr. Boyle was eventually convicted of the murder."Our memory of Clyde, however, comes from
Zyg Plater, who notes that his own interest in the environment started in a public-speaking course when he was an undergrad and that "when Ford gave the law school $2 m to create an
'environmental law' course, I jumped on it. Clyde Summers volunteered to teach it, but knew nothing of the field, so he let us take over completely. We'd prepare short presentations
to each other on everything from whales to population control, and he would listen and often fell asleep at the desk while we had great explorations. (It was the class of '69 that really
launched the citizen movement, with EDF and NRDC born in the halls of Sterling.)" A little more about remarkable Clyde: "born in a one-room tarpaper shack in Grass Range, MT on Nov. 21,
1918. His parents, struggling farmers, moved to CO, SD and NE before settling on a farm outside Winchester, IL" Law degree from U of IL. "During the war, he [despite his brother's
enlistment] declared himself a conscientious objector -- a move that caused the Illinois bar to deny him admission. In 1945, the United States Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 vote, upheld the
bar’s decision", with "an impassioned dissent by Justice Hugo Black."
° MORE MEMORIES °
Lengthy accounts welcome.
Moore In Class Notes for Summer 2020 Peter D'Errico provided remarkable memories of Moore:
"Professor Moore was the only teacher in my law school career who, on his own, broached the question whether a particular rule was "unjust" (it
was a rule against retroactive application of constitutional changes in criminal law, which he contrasted with the civil rule) [He referred to the
1967 Supreme Court case, Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293, which held that retroactive application of a Constitutional rule barring use of
‘tainted" identification evidence’ 'would seriously disrupt the administration of our criminal laws.'" 388 U.S. 293, 300. Stovall was
disapproved of by Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314, 107 S. Ct. 708, 93 L. Ed. 2d 649 (1987)].
Moore also enjoyed joking about law, once saying a simplified rule defining a proper civil complaint meant that “Vomit on a piece of paper will
be a valid federal complaint.” [criticizing Dioguardi v. Durning, 139 F.2d 774 (2d Circuit, 1944)] On another occasion, Moore referred to
dissenting opinions as “subversive literature.”
His students savored an apocryphal story about Moore arguing a procedural issue at the Supreme Court: When a Justice asked him how he squared
his argument with a different interpretation in Moore's Federal Practice, Moore responded, “I've changed my mind!”
Our class dedicated its yearbook to Professor Moore."
About Moore, taken from Guido's tribute to Joe Goldstein, wherein Joe is teaching bankruptcy: "In those golden days, the universally recognized God of bankruptcy was a
short, round, Montana born and bred, former amateur boxer named J.W. Moore. He owned the great bankruptcy treatise, Colliers, as he did the multivolume text in the other field he
dominated, Federal Practice. And he was also universally considered to be a superb classroom teacher. As a result, most of each Yale Law School class-some hundred and sixty-five
students-would flock into his bankruptcy course, called Debtor's Estates (in contrast with Harvard's equivalent, which was named Creditor's Rights)."
Johnstone "He started the property class as usual by employing a Socratic technique with a classmate he called
upon to act as a counsel to defend a position. By the end of a line of questioning by Johnstone, the classmate (I don't remember who he was except he was a male) appeared stumped and
perhaps felt a bit foolish. Johnstone then called upon Elaine Alexander, with the same result except at the end of that line of questioning, Johnstone said “Counsel for the defense has
been dismissed and sent back to the kitchen where she belongs.” I was stunned by that, though afraid to say anything, as we all were. But I did plot to find a way to turn the tables on him in class and eventually, a
couple of classes later, I found the moment to kill his momentum with a punned response to his questioning that won applause in the class."
-- Alan Ziegler
For more on Quinton -- in Africa -- see Zyg's entry on our Roots page.
Short but good profile of Quinton appears here. He lived to be 99!
Peters 113 Yale L.J. 9 2003-2004 contains a warm tribute by Ellen to Gene Rostow and some things about herself, "My first contact with the Dean was a telegram that I received from
him in 1956, during the spring term of my work as a research assistant at Boalt. The telegram offered me a position as an assistant professor at a salary of $7000. For me, that was a
princely sum. It immediately doubled my family's income. I learned later that
although other candidates for faculty positions had been vetted out in extensive personal interviews, I had escaped that daunting process by dint of the fact that California was too
far away. My first assignment, in the fall of 1956, was to teach a small group in contracts. [Earlier she credits Rostow with pioneering the small group course idea]. Sometime
during that fall, the Dean called me in to discuss my second-term teaching obligations, which, he said, would be family law and
commercial law. Family law promised to be an interesting adventure because I could approach it from a fresh perspective, never having taken any such course during law school.
Commercial law, on the other hand, was closer to my law student interests. People sometimes ask me how I came to focus my professorial career on that subject. The Dean is the
answer. Having been told of my teaching assignments, I naturally replied, 'Yes, sir.' It never occurred to me to say anything else." [Thereafter it is the UCC for Ellen].
"Other meetings with the Dean were more personal. In the spring of 1957, I was pregnant. It was reasonably clear that no one on the faculty then had any awareness of my condition.
Perhaps I might have been able to conceal my pregnancy altogether. I was concerned, however, about my professorial future." He asks how she proposes to deal with this. She says
to teach only one small group class in the fall, then to do small group plus regular commitment in the spring. "To my surprise and delight, the Dean immediately agreed. His was a
remarkable decision. This happened at a time when law schools had few women students and even fewer women professors."* Article
here. Ellen has a
Wikipedia page. There we learn she was born in Berlin in 1930 and her parents fled the Nazis in 1939.
*This passage contains the following footnote: "At Boalt Hall, I met one of the very first woman to become a tenured professor at a major law school. She had found it necessary to
conceal her pregnancy, to teach until the day that her child was delivered, and to return to teaching the following day."
Kessler Classmates have so far failed to send in memories, so we've searched and found some by a YLS graduate of 1959,
John K. McNulty, a law prof at Berkeley. There's the "the hypothetical fellow climbing the flagpole to touch the golden eagle at the top, in return for a promise of $10 (to be revoked just as
he neared the eagle)." There's "Yet in the halls one day he stunned me by stating that he thought he 'might have been happier if he had been a farmer'!" There's also his background:
"Fritz was born in Hechingen, Germany, August 25, 1901, the son of Wilhelm and Helene (Krueger) Kessler. His father was a judge, army officer,and 'a stern taskmaster'; his mother a loving
but sometimes unhappy woman. He had a sister, Anneliese, and a brother, Karl Ludwig. Fritz was educated in Tubingen, Munich (a student-in Rechtssoziologie-of Max Weber) and Marburg
(a family tradition), before his years in Berlin (1926-34), where he was a research member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and International Law, and a Privatdozent at the
Handelshochschule from 1931-34. He and Eva Jonas married in 1930, each having been married before, and in 1934 they and her/their two daughters, Inge and Maria, came to the
United States with the aid of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to make their new home. Then it was Yale Law School as an Instructor and Assistant Professor, 1934-38, University of
Chicago Law School (Associate Professor and then Professor) 1938-47, and back to Yale as Justus Hotchkiss and then Sterling Professor of Law, until retirement in 1970."
"Fritz first saw the Yale Law School on October 12, 1934 . . . He tells of his early days and years there, of then going to Chicago, . . . of becoming a U.S. citizen in 1942, and then returning
to Yale in 1947, after a late night of persuasion with Dean Wesley Sturges and a bottle of Jack Daniels. He recounts happy lunches, some decorated by a martini, with Ward Bowman and
Alex Bickel in New Haven. (And if I've seen La Traviata in San Francisco the week before, he will often, at lunch, show he better remembers a performance he saw in Berlin in 1933!)"
McNulty was law prof at Berkeley; his piece on Fritz is here.
fritzkessler.com, btw, is a website, a blog -- a different Fritz, of course.
Sparer Ed inspired Bob Sable, who has many memories: "When Ed came to Yale in 1967, his reputation preceded him, at least among those of us who were
interested in civil legal aid. He had been the director of Mobilization for Youth, a store front legal services program in the Lower East Side which became the prototype for legal services
programs doing impact work on behalf of the poor. He was the founder and first director of the Welfare Law Center in New York which was the NAACP Legal Defense Fund of welfare law
and whose work led, among other cases to Goldberg V Kelly, the Supreme Court case which held that beneficiaries of government services including welfare could not have benefits terminated
without due process anymore than others could have their real estate or accelerated depreciation denied with a right to a due process hearing (and, for another Yale School note, a case in
which the Court explicitly acknowledged the work of Charlie Reich).
His first course on Welfare law, the first such course at Yale, was packed. I don’t recall any of it except some ferocious arguments between him and the now famous Jeff Greenfield.
(My recollection is that Jeff bested him but I can’t for the life of me remember the substance. . . .)
Ed was the only faculty member who was a role model for me. He enlisted me and several others to assist welfare organizing in Connecticut. How this happened I cannot recall. I was
active in the Jerome Frank Legal Services Organization, but I don’t think this project came from Jerome Frank. We certainly weren’t getting credit because I don’t believe any clinical actives
at that time got credit.
In any event, Ed trained us ( I believe at the house he and his wife had rented in Guildford) and sent me, Peter Anderson, a year behind us, and perhaps others, to Ansonia to work with
welfare organizers there. Ansonia is about twelve miles from New Haven and at the time was a dying mill town.
Ed was putting into practice his lifetime of organizing. He trained us in welfare law and in particular “special needs” grants. These were special grants above regular welfare stipends.
Recipients had a right to them but they had to know about them and apply for them. We taught the organizers about them, and they used the promise of these extra grants to get recipients
to a meeting. Peter and I would teach them how to apply for the grants, and the organizers would urge them to join together to fight for a better system.
Ed counseled me about what to do after law school. I was concerned that if I didn’t have the credentials of a big law firm, I would not be able to get the kind of legal services position
where I could make a difference since at the time most of the legal services leaders had come from private practice. Ed, who had graduated law school in about 1959 had gone immediately
to work for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, at that time the equivalent of our going to work for a civil rights or legal services group. (That is a whole other story. Ed worked
or the Union for several years until, he told us, he realized he was spending his time denying workers union pensions on the basis of technicalities, at which point he quit). Ed counseled me
that things were changing and I should immediately do what I wanted to do, to join a legal services organization.
Inspired by Ed, I took a job with the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland and spent my career in legal services. It is surely no coincidence that when I became Executive Director of Greater
Boston Legal Services in 1991, my immediate predecessor was Peter Anderson, the other Sparer acolyte who had worked with me in Ansonia. Ed inspired a generation of legal services
lawyers."
~More here
Wellington Many of us remember that Harry's class in labor law was basically a dialogue with Bruce Ackerman. He eventually became Dean, and he
took up constitutional law. See his tribute to Charles Black, excerpted here in the entry here for Charles.
Katz "born on Oct. 20, 1922, in Zwickau, Germany, one of two sons of Paul and Dora Ungar Katz. His father owned a department store. When Jacob was 11, the Nazis came to power
and his family’s citizenship was revoked. His father managed to get him a Czech passport. At 16, on his own, Jacob went to Prague, and then, by way of Italy and England, made his way
to New York, where he found work in an auto parts store." Then U Vermont, Harvard Med School. USAF. "In 1972, he was named to a federal panel to investigate the Tuskegee Syphilis
Study, a 1932 experiment by the United States Public Health Service in which about 400 infected black men in Alabama were left untreated, with their outcomes compared with those of
about 200 healthy men. The investigation found that at least 28 of the men died as a direct result of syphilis and many others suffered severe damage to the central nervous system, heart
trouble or other ailments. The panel described the study as 'ethically unjustified.' It said penicillin should have been made available to the infected participants in later years and it
called for federal protections for medical research subjects. Dr. Katz said the report did not go far enough. He issued a statement saying that the participants had been 'exploited,
manipulated and deceived.'" What a history! We knew him simply as the pyschiatrist who co-taught with Joe Goldstein. If only we'd known of his past and of his future.
Bickel See the entry on Craig Comstock on the About page for a memory that centers on Bickel. Another memory that centers on Bickel
comes from Mike Parish, whose small seminar 1st year contracts prof was Layman Allen -- who gave some dinners at Mory's for his class and for one invited Bickel. Mike writes:
"We had Bickel one evening-- I adored him not for his jurisprudence, but for having been a machine gunner at Anzio and for the brilliance of his classes.
6 weeks on Marbury for one example. We were joking about Allen's Socratic method extremis and somehow Bickel and I got into a back and forth to see who could ask the most
consecutive questions in answer to a question. We got ten apiece and at that point I said "How should I know?" and everyone cheered and Bickel politely applauded, without disturbing
the fall of his 3 piece suit. That triumph kept me going, although I spent more time reading modern American fiction in law school than I did doing the classwork."
"Having been a machine gunner at Anzio"! Bickel, we hardly knew ya!
Another source for this is Abram Chayes, Alexander M. Bickel: A Personal Remembrance, 88 HARV. L. REV. 693, 693 (1975).
Chayes is cited in another article, one in Cornell J of Law and Public Policy, where it is said: "Alexander Bickel was born in 1924 in Bucharest, Romania. His father, Solomon Bickel, was a Jewish Romanian lawyer and a prominent
Yiddish literary figure. In response to rising anti-Semitism, the family emigrated to the United States in 1939 and settled in New York City. Bickel quickly acculturated and excelled in his studies and, like so many
overachieving immigrants before him, enrolled at City College of New York. His studies were interrupted by his World War II service in the Army as a machine gunner in France and in
Italy." Also: "Abram Chayes noted that, as a soldier in 1944, Bickel 'landed at Anzio in the first wave and had his shoelaces cut by enemy fire.'" Chayes at 693.
Robert A. Burt was in the class of 64 and is now Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law. His essay, "Alexander Bickel's Law School and Ours," 104 Yale L.J. 1853 1994-1995, is
not a personal memoir, more an attempt to describe and analyze Bickel's views and apply them to famous cases, but it does contain this, preceded by a description of the room Bickel taught in:
"Alex Bickel's Law School subterranean structure of that old room still exists and exerts some influence on all of us. The influence on me is obvious because the old room and Alex's
presence as my teacher are still vividly in my mind. Although I can relate my memories to those who never knew Alex, or who never knew him as a teacher in the old Room 127, I cannot
adequately convey the vibrancy and immediacy that he still has for me. Even when I try to conjure his presence, my listeners see only me standing at the western podium talking about Alex
Bickel; I, however, see Alex standing at the southern podium talking to me. My listeners cannot fully comprehend me, nor can I comprehend myself, without understanding that Alex is still
speaking to me as I am speaking to them, and that we are both talking across generations."
Charles Black's "Alexander Mordecai Bickel" 84 Yale L.J. 199, 1974 contains: "The key to my own evaluation of all his thought is in the phrase (which I quote without remembering the
source) that he and I agreed in everything but our opinions. No one in our times, or perhaps in any times, so deeply, so broadly, so imaginatively explored the institutional place of the
courts in shaping the world -- and, even more widely than that, the place of constitutional law in political life."
A curiosity on the net is Bickel's FBI file.
On his way to argue the Pentagon Papers case° STILL MORE
New feature: Jack Tate page.
James Fleming James was, of course, one of the premier tort profs in the world, but he also taught civil procedure. Some of us found
ourselves at sea with CP. There were no good guys and bad guys to sort out what position you should take, just rules. A ship came to our rescue, however: in the middle of the semester,
James's treatise, Civil Procedure was published. It made sense of much. Apart from that, a remark from class is amusing. At one point a question arose as to whether a name -- of an author?
a student? - was a first name or a last name. James remarked something like "Well, when it comes to filling out forms, you should have a name like mine to see the trouble that confusion
can cause." We all laughed because it was suddenly clear that on many occasions he'd been handed back his form with the admonition "You've put your last name in the box for first name and . . . "
We can imagine that our own classmate, Rand Jack, has the same problem.
Bittker John Simon's wonderful tribute to Boris can be found here. The great thing about it is that it is full of Boris-beyond-tax. There's "his 1962 article, 'The Case of the Checker-Board Ordinance: An Experiment in Race Relations.' Soon after, James Forman delivered the 'Black Manifesto' in New York's Riverside Church, demanding reparations for slavery and segregation, Boris provided the first full-scale analysis of this issue, in a 1973 book, The Case for Black Reparations. Boris soon regretted the title, which was chosen by his publisher, for his book did not, as some assumed, conclude that the case was a clear one -- that reparations should now be paid. Instead, he offered a sympathetic but searching examination of that case, an exploration of what he called 'a second American dilemma.' That dilemma, he said, called for a 'national debate on these questions.' He 'sought to open the discussion, not to close it.' " "He was also opposed to the easy cant employed by many tax reformers who, for example, hurled the 'loophole' epithet as a substitute for analysis. '[T]he time has come,' he wrote in 1973, 'for a drastic revision of the rhetoric of tax reform.' And in his active pro bono life he displayed similar independence. As a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, he cast what I was told was the lone dissenting vote against a board resolution he regarded as more 'politically correct' than rational." Plus, Boris warrior. "And what a citizen Boris was -- in every respect! He was a valorous citizen, seriously wounded under German fire in World War II - although I did not learn of his Purple Heart until I had known him for twenty years." Who knew? Pollak also weighs in: In 1946 Boris was called back from govt lawyering to YLS by Dean Wesley Sturges. But Boris wasn't sure this was a better deal, so he "rassled" a deal with the dean for an initial one year rather that the usual three. "And Sturges, to show his gratitude, threw in a sweetener: Boris's government salary was $8000. Sturges signed up Boris for $4000, which was only $500 below Yale University's prescribed minimum salary for an assistant professor. Boris really knew how to negotiate."
Reich "A visit to his class when I was considering law school changed my life. His small group discussion of a difficult case involving
poignant circumstances made me decide I would attend Yale if I could get in. Ironically, I never took his class, but the one class I attended has been etched in my memory for more than
50 years." -- DG
"Charles Reich’s Property class was fascinating . . . we spent much of the term analyzing the 'property rights' of a deportee in social security payments." -- Bill Slattery
As we all remember, Charlie was famous for walking around New Haven after dark -- and, indeed places like Chevy Chase, MD, Santa Barbara, CA, Long Lake, NY -- and being questioned
by police. "I can count nine or ten times that I have been stopped and questioned in the past few years -almost enough to qualify me as an adjunct member of the Mafia."
The Law Journal article he wrote about this is available here.
"I know of no law that requires me to have either a purpose or a destination. If I choose to take an evening walk to see if Andromeda has come up on schedule, I think I am entitled to look
for the distant light of Almach and Mirach without finding myself staring into the blinding beam of a police flashlight."
Those still interested in Reich's encounters with the police will find this 2016 analysis of interest: YLJ.
His obit in the SF Chronicle can be found here.
Bork One memory is of him "saying in class that perhaps he was wrong about a position he had been maintaining in our philosophic
problems in constitutional law seminar, with Bickel and two other faculty members and about nine of us students. I don't ever remember a faculty member making that kind of
admission before students." --Alan Z.
See the note at end of entry for Ronnie Dworkin, which points to a lengthy article on Ronnie that amounts to a mini-biography, including an account of the
course he co-taught one year with Bork -- hard to imagine that! (It did not go well). Click here.
Emerson Difficult to imagine a law school faculty containing both Bork and Tommie Emerson. In Chinese philosophy Yin and Yang are described as
"seemingly opposite or contrary forces that may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world." And in this case?
Classmate memories of Tommie have not yet dropped in over the transom (though they'd be welcome), but his friend Norman Dorsen published a tribute when Tommie retired, eight years after we
graduated, which is available here. At the time Norman was NYU law prof and General
Counsel of the ACLU. We learn that Tommie first published his famous Political and Civil Rights in the United States in 1952, the height of the McCarthy era. [What did Bork think of
McCarthy, whose minor defects included lying about his military career?] In the book, he says that he "probably could not gain government security clearance today."
"I can think of no law teacher whose life and work more plainly reflect ethical ideals. Perhaps the most dramatic evidence was his refusal to withdraw from a leadership position in the
National Lawyer's Guild after that organization was attacked during the McCarthy period as a Communist front." "Or perhaps it was his break in 1950 with the Progressive Party over its
stand on Korea; at the time he said, 'I am a man without a party.'" Hard to believe, but the Progressive Party had said that South Korea was the aggressor! Tommie attacked
J. Edgar: "In 1949, he and David Helfeld published [in YLJ] a long and biting article criticizing the Federal Loyalty Program and the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover responded by stating that the article
contained 'inaccuracies, distortions, and misstatements' concerning the FBI, and that its opinions were 'most frequently expressed on the pages of The Daily Worker.'" YLS v. JEH. A
Princeton conference three years after we graduated (JEH declined to attend), for which Tommie prepared two major papers, thoroughly denounced Hoover's abuses of the constitution.
A right to privacy? Tommie was there even before Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which struck down a "Comstock law" against contraception (see our About page here for Comstock)
-- though he also briefed and argued the case in the Supreme Court. One of Norman's concluding takes on Tommie"s soft and conservative style: "I have never heard Emerson say a
personally unkind word about anyone". Difficult to imagine.
A. Goldstein Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 3-11-70: "Abraham Samuel Goldstein, son of a Ukrainian emigrant who
became a pushcart peddler on New York’s Lower East Side, was appointed yesterday as dean of the Yale Law School, effective July 1. Mr. Goldstein, 44, a former trial lawyer, joined the
school in 1956 as an associate professor, becoming a full professor in 1961 and acceding to the endowed William Nelson Cromwell Chair in 1968. He is a specialist in criminal law. Fleming
James, chairman of the faculty committee that made the selection, described Mr. Goldstein as 'a man with strong and imaginative ideas about the future of legal education,' and Charles
L. Black, one of the new dean’s professorial colleagues, called him 'a legal scholar of the first order.'
Mr. Goldstein was born July 27, 1925, in Manhattan, the fourth child of Yiddish-speaking Isadore and Yetta Goldstein. An economics major at City College, in New York, he was graduated
from Yale Law School in 1949. 'I’m very aggressively in favor of lots of changes,' the appointee said yesterday, 'but I want to be very careful to tailor them to who our students are and
what we uniquely can do with our students.' "Stubborn" was among the glowing attributes his colleagues mentioned in a NYT article."
Archive.
Rodell Fred Rodell was my most colorful professor and perhaps biggest influence. He took his classes in legal writing to meet with Supreme Court justices every year. Our class
went there in April of our 3rd year. Justice William O. Douglas was Fred’s pal. Douglas talked last. With a scowl on his face looking at his watch, and muttering that he had a dentist
appointment in twenty minutes he answered most questions with one word. That morning J. Brennan had announced an uncharacteristically conservative ruling upholding the conviction
of a Long Island druggist who had sold a copy of Playboy to an underage teenager in violation of a town ordinance. As Douglas was back-peddling out the door, I screwed up my
courage and asked: “Mr. Justice Douglas, why is the Supreme Court so hung up on sex?” Faces blanched, I braced, but Douglas, without breaking step
instantly responded, “Oh I don’t know, about that, Brennan wrote a book a few years ago called An Affair of State.” Whereupon he disappeared out the door.
-- Mike Gross
PS. Mike also says: Fred backed our short lived Yale Advocate newspaper. It was the best thing I did in law school.
Fred was a photog, proud of his "old, old Leica camera." How old? "I just don't know. I bought it secondhand a little more than thirty years ago. My hunch . . . shortly after World
War I." Her Infinite Variety: Captured in Color.Thirty-six Women Around the World 1966.
PS. Fred wrote about Bickel: "Alexander Bickel and the Harvard-Frankfurter School of Judicial Inertia, SCANLON's, May 1970, at 76." He also reviewed William F. Buckley's 1951
book, God and Man at Yale, arguing that most Catholics would resent Buckley's "deliberate concealment" of his "very relevant church affiliation." 25 years later, in a new Introduction,
Buckely replied. He asked whether it would be "relevant for a reviewer of a book by Fred Rodell on the Supreme Court and Freedom of Religion to accuse the author of
"deliberate concealment" of the "very relevant" fact that his name used to be Fred [actually, Alfred] Rodelheim, and that his interpretation of the Freedom Clause was tainted in virtue
of his lifetime's concealment of his having been born Jewish? That would have gone down—quite properly—as anti-Semitism." Fred changed his name at age 21.
Chirelstein In a 2016 tribute by Columbia colleague, Michael Graetz,
we learn that that the second of our "two tax law giants," Marv, was a smoker, race-track punter, fan of boxing and baseball, accomplished violinist and someone who suffered from
writer's block. Of this last, Marv says in his tribute to Boris, who suffered no such block, "The fine portrait of Boris that hangs in the student lounge at Yale Law School misses only one thing, and that
is a tiny cartoon of me in the lower right-hand corner in the attitude of The Scream." A pretty funny remark -- as is his wish to be "buried at the seventh furlong pole at Belmont."
Marv's most famous book, Federal Income Taxation (Concepts and Insights) came out thirty years after we graduated, as did Case Analysis in the Law of Contracts.
Bill Clinton, we learn, praised Marv's "gifted teaching," a man with "endless curiosity" and a "generous spirit," but also that Bill "confessed to reading One Hundred Years of Solitude
during Marvin's federal income tax class". Do any of our classmates have a memory of Marv they can share? Marv grew up in Chicago, was a Berkeley grad who went to U Chicago law
school, where he was a good friend of Bork. He published an interesting article on Bork and Dworkin in 2013, available
here.
Mike Parish has now answered the call here to share a memory of Marv: "I took Corporate Tax from Marv Chirelstein in the small room across from the Registrar's office. He stood
through the whole class, shaking the change in his pockets, firing out questions and talking at machine gun speed, and I was never so frightened in my life. I skipped about 3 weeks
because I was afraid I'd be called on, especially after the first question he asked was answered by Ed Rogers with a fulsome discussion of the uses of preferred stock. I didn't realize
Ed's dad was GC of JP Morgan, which would have helped. Eventually I went back to class and managed to answer a question and calmed down. My point in this story is that he gave us a
3 question exam, and the second question was particularly good since it had no corporate tax issues in it, although there were a number of issues you needed to ID and say No, that's not
a problem. I thought that, in a nutshell, showed what was great about our school, that you had people who had the brains and balls to give exams where the answer was none. When you
think about it, that's much deeper than it looks, and I found frequently in law firm practice that I had partners who would find a problem frequently where there was none, so they could
claim some billable hours and a larger share of the purse. Live and learn, hopefully."
Winter In his tribute to Joe Goldstein, Max Gitter has written of Ralph -- "Joe's questions drew me out, although I had never spoken in class before. (That's not literally true: in Ralph
Winter's torts class I sat in the back next to my roommate and we talked to one another the entire semester)."
Winter's obit is here. We learn that: "From 1961-1962, he clerked
for a new judge on the Second Circuit, then Judge Thurgood Marshall. " And that: "Judge Winter entered judicial service on January 5, 1982. Justice Marshall traveled to New Haven to
administer the oath of office to his protégé and lifelong friend, in a ceremony at the Yale Law School Auditorium." And now in our Class Notes, Summer 2021, we find that one of our classmates,
Jim Mezzanote, was a close friend of Ralph Winter. Jim recounts some very interesting experiences, including how he prepared Ralph's estate plan -- q.v.
Layman Allen An odd duck: a logician (symbolic logic) as a law prof. He was with us only our first year, did not get tenure, then moved on to U Mich law school. Mike Parish was in the
first-year small seminar on contracts "that Layman Allen led for us, if you can call it that. He was a wonderful man and a terrible teacher, in that we had to use only neoHohfeldian language
(a word I haven't thought of in over 50 years but that showed up right on schedule). He invented WFF 'N Proof, designed to help
get your kid into Yale and made a ton of money advertising it in The New Republic, The Nation, Commentary etc. When he moved to MIchigan after failing to get tenure, he insisted on
selling his home to a black family, and he paid for and organized twice monthly dinners for us and a different distinguished faculty member. He also paid for those dinners, often at Mory's,
out of his own pocket. But he never answered a question except with a question. Finally, we had an impasse on the famous case of
Pillans v. Van Mierop by Lord
Mansfield, during which he turned himself inside out (Mansfield) to find a binding contract in the absence of any consideration whatsoever, blowing the common law to bits as
he wrote. None of us could understand the case since it involved Dutch/English international trade, letters of credit, bills of lading etc. Finally, Allen proposed a hypothetical to help
us understand, which turned out to be his explication of the case in sheep's clothing. When he finished, Peter Bradford, with his deep voice in the high-ceilinged room, said, as if he were
speaking in a disembodied voice, 'Did someone drop the hidden ball?' " His U Mich Law obit (Winter 2019) is here.
Deutsch Jan was born in Katowice, Poland. Did any of you take one of his classes? A memory of him by Mark Tushnet '70, the sort of memory we wish '68 would
produce, appears here.
__________________________________________
Those for whom we still need memories:
Bowman / Clark / Deutsch
Duke / Hudec / Lasswell
Simon / Stevens / Trubek
And:
